Donaldson's Obscure Words - Official Thread

[Dromond]

[duchess of malfi]

[Variol Farseer]

Iffen y'all duzn't mind, I'll be making posts a little longer than the dictionary entries appearing in the thread so far. Landwaster, you may excerpt & abridge (or not) as you see fit.

I shall also make some comments on the existing entries. If they are not of interest, just razz me & I will discontinue.

[Variol Farseer]

From TWL:
A preterite fear of hidden pits and predators scraped at his nerves.

This is one of the more interesting words in Donaldson's vocabulary, because he uses it to give a dash of colour and mystery to passages where it has hardly any discoverable meaning at all.

OED gives two main senses of preterite: 'pertaining to bygone time', and '(Gram.) expressing past action or state'. Most people, if they know the word at all, know it in the second sense, as a term in grammar. The 'preterite tense' is the simple past tense: I came, I saw, I wrote a trilogy. The first definition is the etymological one, from Latin praeterire, 'to go before', and is hardly used in present-day English.

An example, with the archaic spellings made modern: 'In . . . heaven . . . there is nothing preterit nor passed, there is nothing future nor coming; but all things together in that place be present everlasting.' Caxton talks of a lady's 'preteryte husband', meaning her ex-husband.

So how do we make sense of the usage in TWL quoted above? Covenant is not suffering from a past or bygone fear, but from one that is distinctly and obviously present. Perhaps SRD means that it is a primitive or primaeval fear, but preterite does not mean those things. He could mean 'a fear out of Covenant's past, now revived', but I don't see the evidence that Covenant once had such a fear and then outgrew it. Besides, the very act of reviving the fear makes it no longer preterite.

A rare theological usage of the word, according to OED, is 'One who is passed over or not elected by God.' Just conceivably, SRD is referring to this, and means to say 'a damned fear'; but I can hardly stretch my credulity to believe it.

My only really definite comment is that of Inigo to Vizzini in The Princess Bride: 'You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.'[/b]

[Variol Farseer]

Apotheosis is one of SRD's favourite words. He drags it in by the heels in all sorts of odd places. I won't cite instances, but it's significant that he uses it as one of Angus Thermopyle's three override codes in The Gap. There, when Warden Dios wants to invoke the code without seeming to be obvious about it, he can't think of anything better to say than this:

'We're facing a total crisis here. An outright apotheosis.'

No self-respecting English teacher would accept that as a vocab sentence.

Now, the original meaning of the word, in Greek and English, was 'the act of becoming a god'. When Hercules died, he was worshipped as a god; that was his apotheosis. In Christian times, the word took on an additional meaning, 'the ascription of divine glory', so that one could speak of the apotheosis of a saint. The saint was not actually a god, but was glorified by God.

SRD appears to favour a third meaning: 'a deified ideal'. Now, we must be careful about the word ideal. Nowadays we might think an ideal is simply a very good example of something, and that in fact is rather the way SRD often uses the word. Actually it is a very precise technical term in the Platonic theory of Ideas. So you may have horses, this horse and that horse, big horses and little ones; but The Horse, the Idea of the horse, is an abstract and eternal entity that has its own existence apart from all the physical horses that exemplify it. The Idea belongs in the realm of divine things, and is in that sense an apotheosis.

So the definition first given in the list, 'the perfect example', is very similar to the Platonic meaning. Actually it is not the example that is an apotheosis, but the Idea that it is an example of; but people often use the word metaphorically. However, it is hard to justify SRD's way of making it a pet word, using it almost regardless of its actual meaning, as in the Warden Dios quotation above. SRD is a very poetic writer, and at bottom I think he just really likes the sound of it.

[Variol Farseer]

I should perhaps point out that tintinnabulating is derived from tintinnabulation, a word invented by Edgar Allan Poe in his poem 'The Bells':

To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells --
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

The word is derived from Latin tintinnabulum 'a little tinkling bell', which in turn comes from tinnire 'to ring'. The word tinnitus, for a ringing in the ears, derives from the same root.

[Seafoam Understone]

well one thing is for sure... shows our favorite author is well read...
Nevermore!

[Landwaster]

well go to www.kevinswatch.com then look under the main page where it says Covenant lists and then click on that... then it'll read something that says...ummm glossary.. ya that's it... there's no specific link that'll take you to it... at least none that I found anyway.. wait a tic... hold on..
wam.umd.edu/~resop/gloss.html
heh and I thought I was still computer illiterate... heh heh heh heh heh (Beavis and Butthead... btw did you know that Butthead has a brother... his name is Richard Head... wait for it... wait for it... )

Oh ok ... a glossary as in different to the above! Gotcha now.

[Landwaster]

Than you everybody for your contributions, I've just brought the page up to speed as best I can.

[Guest]

From TWL:
A preterite fear of hidden pits and predators scraped at his nerves.

This is one of the more interesting words in Donaldson's vocabulary, because he uses it to give a dash of colour and mystery to passages where it has hardly any discoverable meaning at all.

OED gives two main senses of preterite: 'pertaining to bygone time', and '(Gram.) expressing past action or state'. Most people, if they know the word at all, know it in the second sense, as a term in grammar. The 'preterite tense' is the simple past tense: I came, I saw, I wrote a trilogy. The first definition is the etymological one, from Latin praeterire, 'to go before', and is hardly used in present-day English.

An example, with the archaic spellings made modern: 'In . . . heaven . . . there is nothing preterit nor passed, there is nothing future nor coming; but all things together in that place be present everlasting.' Caxton talks of a lady's 'preteryte husband', meaning her ex-husband.

So how do we make sense of the usage in TWL quoted above? Covenant is not suffering from a past or bygone fear, but from one that is distinctly and obviously present. Perhaps SRD means that it is a primitive or primaeval fear, but preterite does not mean those things. He could mean 'a fear out of Covenant's past, now revived', but I don't see the evidence that Covenant once had such a fear and then outgrew it. Besides, the very act of reviving the fear makes it no longer preterite.

A rare theological usage of the word, according to OED, is 'One who is passed over or not elected by God.' Just conceivably, SRD is referring to this, and means to say 'a damned fear'; but I can hardly stretch my credulity to believe it.

My only really definite comment is that of Inigo to Vizzini in The Princess Bride: 'You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.'[/b]

Pynchon in Gravity's Rainboow uses the word preterite extensively. It basically a theme of many if not all of his novels.
The definition of one who is passed over is his take on the word, as he examines the lives of those who are forgotten and indeed passed over in history. He brings attention to the others.

[Roynish]

Woops that was me again, regards Roynish.

[W.B.]

Yeah, preterite is a weird one. He's definitely using things the word might suggest rather than what dictionaries explicitly mean. Anyway, I have for a defintion culled from a couple different sources

preterite - adjective - 1. [grammatical] expressing past action or state 2. [rare] former 3. belonging wholly to the past; passed by - noun - 1. the past tense 2. a verb in the past tense

The given definition makes sense in Lord Foul's Bane (page 26 in paperback):

Beggars and fanatics, holy men, prophets of the apocalypse did not belong on that street in that sunlight; the frowning, belittling eyes of the stone columns held no tolerance for such preterite exaltation.

But in Farseer's example

A preterite fear of hidden pits and predators scraped at his nerves.

I think what Donaldson is trying to go for is a kind of deeply embedded instinctive reaction (in this case fear) that the human race has held ancestrally for generations and which now comes to us as an inarticulate reaction of our unconscious mind. The word has heavy conontations of "ancestral." So, some kind of deeply embedded instinct or impulse passed down from time immemorial.

[kastenessen]

Just found a word in "The Kings of Tarshish Shall Bring Gifts"...Simionic...have no idea what it means...but I think simian has something to do with cats...anybody?

[kastenessen]

I found it! And it was "Simoniac", which means: one who practises simony, and that means: Bying or selling something spiritual...

[amanibhavam]

I found it! And it was "Simoniac", which means: one who practises simony, and that means: Bying or selling something spiritual...

... and it comes from the name of Simon Mage, known from the Deeds of the Apostles.

As for preterite, English is not my native tongue, and I always imagined preterite meaning "primitive, atavistic".

[W.B.]

Here's one that I think is simply misspelled, since I can't find it anywhere: excrudescence.

The word's usage on pg. 29 of TOT paperback fits with the definition of excrescence: 1. something that protrudes 2. An excrescent appendage, as, a wart or tumor; anything growing out unnaturally from anything else; a preternatural or morbid development; hence, a troublesome superfluity; an incumbrance; as, an excrescence on the body, or on a plant

[Variol Farseer]

Here's one that I think is simply misspelled, since I can't find it anywhere: excrudescence.

The word's usage on pg. 29 of TOT paperback fits with the definition of excrescence: 1. something that protrudes 2. An excrescent appendage, as, a wart or tumor; anything growing out unnaturally from anything else; a preternatural or morbid development; hence, a troublesome superfluity; an incumbrance; as, an excrescence on the body, or on a plant

In the quotation, the venom has just flared up in Covenant's blood:

His beard seemed to bristle like an excrudescence of pain.

Recrudescence means a fresh outbreak of a dormant disease, like an attack of malaria, or cancer coming out of remission. It derives from Latin recrudescere, to become raw again.

Excrudescence is a specialized medical term. I haven't got a medical dictionary, but it appears to mean 'breaking out in sores or lesions'. It appears on the Web in a short article on squamous cell papilloma:

This is a condition that arises from keratinocytes. It may form a horn-like excrudescence. The lesion should be excised or curetted with cautery.

If pain can be considered a disease -- as I suppose it can in a place like the Land, and to someone with Linden Avery's health-sense -- then it can break out in lesions. And when Covenant's beard stands on end as he goes into his venom-induced spasm, likening that to an excrudescence is, I think, a very good simile.

[Landwaster]

Thanks folks, I've added excrudescence, but we still need to work out which way we'd prefer to go ... as it may be better to defer to the dictionary of W.B.

[Dragonlily]

Farseer:

If pain can be considered a disease -- as I suppose it can in a place like the Land, and to someone with Linden Avery's health-sense -- then it can break out in lesions. And when Covenant's beard stands on end as he goes into his venom-induced spasm, likening that to an excrudescence is, I think, a very good simile.

Especially when you add in the connotations of repulsiveness attached to "excrudescence," it adds another dimension to what SRD is saying.

[W.B.]

Oh yeah, I forgot the "look it up on a search engine" gambit--sometimes it's about all you can do with some of the weirder words!

So basically, seems like the two words have very similar meaning, excrudescence having a more specific medical meaning, but being basically a projecting (external) growth manifested by some kind of infection. Hm, have to look in a medical dictionary sometime and see if it's associated with and particular kind of outbreak of disease.

BTW, papilloma is a small benign epithelial tumor, such as a wart, and squamous is scaly or platelike.